I attend Western Governor's University and I'm working on a big paper. I'm writing the paper on an IP phone system replacement that I worked through a couple of years ago, but part of the paper is to review other work done by a third party that is relevant and directly relates to my project. I can conduct interviews, review white papers and research studies of other IT Pros.

I'd appreciate it if a few of you would respond with the basics of your IP phone system replacement project, some things that you might do different, or that you were glad that you did, some things to watch out for, or even steer clear of entirely.

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A couple years ago when I was in my last semester at the Tech College my project management class helped out a Veterinarian in a neighboring town with his phone setup.

His original setup was to have a call manager installed on a PC tower in the basement of the vet office what was connected to the provider line and then went to the buildings' punch down panel to the phones. The call manager he was using was pretty base and it couldn't easily do call waiting or call forwarding so the Vet asked out instructor for some ideas.

Switching over to VoIP was the consensus in the class since we just completed our VoIP management class the semester before, so we went to work looking up options, from Asterisk to Vonage we looked up solutions and we thought we had a good deal with Vonage until they threw in a whole mess of fees that weren't part of the "base cost" so we went with a IP Trunk line that charges per minute and the charge was pretty low on top of that. Then we checked his internet contract and wouldn't you know it his Internet Provider was gutting him pretty bad on costs compared to the new Fiber provider that was in the area, so we had him drop his old phone line, minimize the old provider's speed to keep it as a redundant line and got him lined up with the ISP using fiber and got him almost ten times his old speed for under half the cost.

The Vet went hog wild at the start and before we even agreed to do VoIP the guy ordered 12 Cisco 7960 IP Phones and wouldn't you know it they were SCCP ready instead of SIP, so your's truly was put in charge of re-imaging the phones without any idea how to do that and I'll have you know every google and youtube search did not provide ANY form of setup before imaging, it took me a whole week to finally track down the proper combo of config file coding and image version before I got the goofy things ready to go.

At the end of the project one of my classmates went to the Vets office and installed the Asterisk on his old PC tower, put in the final configs in for the IP trunk line and installed all the phones. According the instructor the Vet loves the setup and its been going strong these last 3 years.

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I don't have anything useful to contribute (when my previous employer implemented VOIP, it was over 15 years ago, and I was just one of the on-site hands-on guys to actually put the phones in place; I never worked the design or implementation on the back end).

But I do like that you came right out and said this was a homework assignment :) Too many Pimi "1st Post" users posing obvious homework questions without the decency to say that it's homework (or even making an effort to try to answer it themselves first before begging us to do it for them).

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I would recommend Phil@CommQuotes and Jared Buschon giving you some ideas as to how would it be best to implement VOIP and Phone Systems in general. In my experience is best to document the processes that the company is using for the phones, then prepare the plan for the new one based on the functions and needs of the company and go from there. There should be room for testing and reviewing how it would work.

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My response is similar to when IT Pros ask regarding projects in flight... It all depends on the details , specific requirements, topology, applications etc. One solution that is a home run for one business, is a flop for another.

What we do for our clients is a full deep dive into the details, agree upon an understanding of those details and offer good solutions based on real world experience with providers and technology.

I realize this is not exactly helpful via thread post but would be happy to set a time and discuss more in depth by phone. We can run through specific phone migrations we've done or even hypothetical based on us doing this thousands of times across all verticals, sizes, etc.

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But I do like that you came right out and said this was a homework assignment :) Too many Pimi "1st Post" users posing obvious homework questions without the decency to say that it's homework (or even making an effort to try to answer it themselves first before begging us to do it for them).

This isn't so much "homework" that we frown upon and remove posts asking for help, but this is more like raw data needed for a paper.